The National Geographic Magazine
"Look at that!" Tony shouted as we passed
Utica, the Valley metropolis.
Ahead he had seen the mighty trench
through which the prehistoric Mohawk
drained a chain of great interior lakes. At
what is now Little Falls the icy waters of
Lake Iroquois, predecessor of Lake Ontario,
plunged over a mountain barrier in a volume
at least as great as that of Niagara. Through
the deep resulting gorge now tumbles the
shrunken modern Mohawk while the highest
lift lock on the Barge Canal carries boats
up and down (page 74 and Plate XIV).
Twenty-five miles downstream we saw where
the river had cut straight through another
Adirondack spur, its whimsical waters carving
the bluffs called Big Nose and Little Nose.
From high in the air we could see the flow
of automobiles, trains, and barges, all follow-
- Highways
2o
ing this great east-west crease created by
running water.
At Schenectady the 250 big buildings of the
General Electric Company's plant sprawl like
a city within a city. Here the river spreads
and meanders over the bed of another old lake,
then winds east to the Hudson.
There we saw the Mohawk end in a mam
moth anticlimax-a waterless waterfall. Ex
cept in winter, all but a tiny trickle is diverted
to the Barge Canal, and the thundering torrent
of Cohoes Falls-which moved the Irish bard
Thomas Moore to poetry-is only a mass of
brownish rock as dry as a thirsty throat.
For a closer acquaintance with the river
and canal, we found a boat, the Wanderwell,
a 25-footer used for fishing on Oneida Lake.
The skipper was the type with whom it
would have been a delight to sail around the